


Live For Always

by redvineshark



Category: Green Room (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:13:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27752863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redvineshark/pseuds/redvineshark
Summary: There's a lot of aftermath to sort through, but mostly it's just quiet.
Relationships: Pat/Tiger
Kudos: 1





	Live For Always

Pat can hardly feel anything. Distantly, there’s shouting. Kicking. A shot that makes him flinch back and take in a sharp breath. Something scraping against wood. But it’s like he’s underwater, floating there and seeing shapes on the surface, without the will to keep himself from drowning. It’s Tiger that pulls him back up.

He hadn’t realized he was screaming until Tiger was quelling it, holding his good arm with one hand and his shoulder with the other. “Hey, look at me, yeah? C’mon, c’mon Pat, you’re okay-”

It kicks back up with the sounds of scuffling and screaming in the background, the shock fading enough to feel the gravity of everything all at once. And it’s really fucking heavy. His breath tapers, coming out in heaves and sobs he doesn’t quite recognize as his own aside from the soreness that wracks his throat. 

“Pat! Pat, Pat! Look at me, look at me, look at me, okay? Shush. Shh.” Tiger’s rubbing one of his hands up and down the upper half of his bad arm, and he’s pretty sure it’s supposed to be comforting but it only makes him more aware that the arm is there and fucking hurting. He can’t tell if he’s screaming because of the blood, the pain, the fear, or just screaming to scream, but Sam is shouting something about pressure and then Tiger is taking his cheek in one hand and Pat is leaning into it like he hasn’t been properly touched in years. “I know. I know, I know. Just breathe. Just breathe, okay? Breathe.”

So he does. He takes box breaths, the kind his high school guidance counselor taught him when he panicked in her office over his (lack of) plans for the future. In for four, hold for four. Out for four, hold for four. It doesn’t do anything for the pain, but it’s enough to stop the wailing enough for Tiger to smile sadly at him and stroke his cheek with the thumb of the hand still cupped around it when Pat whimpers “hurts.” But then he’s turning to see Reece red in the face and spitting concentration, an arm kept firm around the neck of Big Justin the Nazi and oh fuck we’re still here. He turns back to Tiger, whose hand has left his face, for any reassurance, but he’s staring wide eyed behind him. His voice comes out wet and stretched thin. “What? What? ...Tiger, what is it?”

He wishes he hadn’t turned around as soon as he’s done it. The dude’s guts are threatening to spill from the formidable gash cut from pelvis to near sternum, leaking blood like it’s all that’s in him. The red sea is parted by Reece shoving him off of himself, scrambling to his feet as Tiger staggers to his own. Pat feebly grabs for Tiger’s hand, limp at his side. But Tiger bats him away and makes his way across the room and reaches for a chair, banging it against a wooden panel in the floor and gesturing for everyone else to follow. He meets Pat’s eye as he starts to stand and shakes his head, so Pat falls back to the floor and clutches his arm. The chair is broken before Tiger makes a scratch on the X’d out panel. 

“Where’s the gun?” He groans out, and Reece runs a hand through his hair before he nods his head over to a side table near Sam, then laughs under his breath.

“Surprised you held on.” He murmurs, a bit of pride underneath it that makes Pat smile a little before he can think about it too much. Reece sighs and looks around expectantly, abandoning the rod he’d been using as a battering ram. “Hey. I’m going. There’s no...air shaft, sewage system, nothin-”

Crack, crack, crack, and then Tiger is standing above the busted in panel, chair leg in hand and wiping at the sweat on his forehead. “Well, there it is.” Enough of a start at least for Reece to punch it the rest of the way in with a mic stand. 

All Pat can think to do is look over his shoulder. He doesn’t know if he can stand, at least not without walking like a newborn deer, assuming the blood loss doesn’t knock him out before he gets the chance. So he tries to keep himself from sounding too pathetic when he asks Amber to just let him know what they find, and throws in an apology about her friend whose name he can't remember for good measure.

The next thing he knows they’re climbing back up, rambling about heroin and bunkers and ways out. Tiger adjusts the towel around his arm and murmurs reassurances he doesn’t fully register because his eyes are too locked on the duct tape in Tiger’s hand. He lets out little gasps and grips Tiger’s shirt while he wraps it around him and tries to focus on anything else, jumping in on conversation with the others while Tiger gets to the halfway point. Tiger’s hands are strong and calloused, nudging at his skin where he reaches to pull the tape around. His head is muddled, but somewhere in there he sees Rick Silva’s own strong, calloused hands around the grip of a paintball gun, and his mouth moves without his permission. He isn’t entirely sure what’s coming out of it, other than Rick Silva and trees and ex-marines, but then Reece is cutting him off and Tiger is biting the duct tape off the roll, and he guesses that means the story’s finished. 

“Pat, you’re done, too.” Tiger mutters, and then gets to his feet and starts to heave him up. “Ready?”

“Sorry man, we gotta go.” Reece says, and Pat says it’s okay, even though he’s pretty sure nothing’s okay right now and probably never will be again. Reece says they won’t all live with a certainty that settles as a tight pit in Pat’s chest, but maybe they won’t all die, and they go through desert island bands. Pat draws a blank, because he couldn’t name their own band right now if he tried, so instead he shrugs and goes through the motions of following everyone else toward the door. Reece has got the gun, the others armed with whatever they could find that could cut or hit hard enough. 

They’re hardly past the hallway before he hears the shot. He tries to quicken his pace, but Tiger is frozen in front of him, and his legs are still too wobbly to move with confidence. He makes it round the corner to growling and jumbled shouting. The man standing in the doorway had got a bullet to the shoulder and is hissing and cursing, dropping the leash to allow for the dog to charge out at Tiger. Pat watches as Reece jumps over the counter to search the bar for exits, his feet glued to the floor as he watches the dog take Tiger down. He screams his name, throat still aching, and starts to move to try his best to help, but Sam and Amber are already prying the dog off of him as the man makes a run for it, presumably to fetch the rest of them. Pat winces when Amber uses the box cutter to injure the dog’s leg enough for it to be slowed down in another chase, but rushes over to help Tiger to his feet and shout for Reece over his shoulder. They bolt back to the green room as fast as they can manage between the five and the wounds scattered amongst them.

The rest of the night goes by in flashes and shots and tight grips and screams. His arm is most certainly fucked, but he got the least of it, as far as he’s concerned. Amber makes it out with a bullet to the leg and a few stray bites, Sam got mauled, Reece is kicking with a shot or two and a mark from a knife held to his neck, and Tiger’s lucky his throat wasn't ripped right out. He feels ashamed for all his wailing when they’d gone for his arm after watching the others just keep moving. He’d held Tiger’s hand tight in the green room, pressing their foreheads together. Look at me, he’d said, I know, shh, even though he knew he needed it more than Tiger did. 

He’s resting his head on Tiger’s shoulder and gripping Sam’s hand on the dirt road while they wait for help to show up. Neither of them can say much of anything, but it’s nice to feel something that isn’t the pain shooting up from his arm or the wind biting at his freshly shaven head. Amber had nabbed a phone off one of the bodies and rung up the cops, even though Tiger had squeezed his good arm like he meant to snap it when she started dialing. In the meantime, it’s quiet. Anyone left that can speak doesn't have the words anyway.

He watches as his friends are hauled off into ambulances, teams of medics walking alongside them frantically for fear of suddenly losing someone. He feels that fear in him too, burrowing itself within the festering gashes of his arm as he’s loaded into an ambulance of his own. He almost laughs, but he’s more worried about the hospital bill than anything else. 

Sam’s heart stops twice. He doesn’t find out until later, when she’s stable but deep under. He still feels like he’s lying in wait, twiddling his thumbs until the minute it stops for good, even when the doctors tell him it’s unlikely to happen again. Reece was under the knife for four hours, and Pat waited with bated breath for every minute of them. Amber won’t talk to him. He can’t blame her.

Tiger is still passed out, has been for days. Pat sits with him a lot of the time, holding his hand and giving experimental squeezes. Mostly because there’s this...Thing. This Thing that’s not really A Thing, but that Pat thinks about a lot anyway. There’s this Thing that makes him visit Tiger every day and into most nights, this Thing that leaves him worried sick about him, this Thing that makes him hope that Tiger wakes up as soon as possible but also wish he never ever lays eyes on him again. Because there was a Before. Before the green room, before the tour, before they even got their first real gig, before the Ain’t Rights were born. When Pat was just a shaky graduate on a “gap year,” and Tiger was a freshman in community college. When Pat was walking down the street one evening and there was this blue-haired kid with his garage door wide open, strumming a kinda buzzy guitar off-beat and screaming into a shitty mic while some dude in the back banged the drums like he was trying to break them. And Pat just kinda stood there watching them, awestruck, like he’d just witnessed the second coming, because that was the coolest shit he’d ever seen. The blue-haired kid finished, let the drums taper off, hung his head and breathed heavy for a few beats. And then he looked up, and he said “Oh. Hey. I like your shirt. Screeching Weasel, yeah?”

They waved him over, and they talked. Shared a couple cigs. Talked about bands they liked and shit ones they didn’t. Talked about how they weren’t really a band, but they wanted to be, once they got someone on bass and a guitarist who could actually play, and Hey man, you play anything? and no, he didn’t, but he was saying yes before he could stop himself because talking with these guys was the most interesting thing to happen to him...ever, maybe. So he picked up an old bass from a thrift shop after pawning some of his mother’s boxed up old jewelry. He could get her even better ones after the band took off. He watched a bunch of youtube videos, and he wasn’t great, but he could play a bass better than Tiger could play the guitar, and that’s better than nothing. He never promised he was any good, right? Either way, he was in. 

After most rehearsal days, Reece would insist on going out somewhere. A bar, or some show with cheap tickets, or whatever fast food joint was close, where they’d park and go eat on the sidewalk and talk about whatever. But one night in particular, it was their favorite bar. It was more crowded than usual, and they got a little too rowdy, drank a little too much. Reece had clocked out early and called a lift home, had something going on the next day Pat couldn’t remember for the life of him. But Tiger stayed. Tiger danced with him, and bought him a drink, and Tiger kissed him in an alley out back mid-smoke. Tiger kissed the breath out of him, Tiger kissed him like he was water in the desert, Tiger kissed him like he was the moon and stars and everything under them, and he tasted like cheap beer and cigarettes and cinnamon gum, but it was fine because it was Tiger. Until he pulled away and sat in silence for a few seconds, and then coughed into his fist and said “Sorry, Pat. I, uh....I didn’t mean to make things all....”

And Pat said “No! No, it’s. It’s...fine.” because he didn’t know how to tell him that that was the most he’s felt of anything in a while, and there was a part of him that had always hoped, and he was really, really glad that Tiger finally did something and-

“Right. Cool.” He lit up another cigarette and Pat watched the smoke puff out and trail up into the night. “It doesn’t have to be, y’know. A whole...Thing.”

“Oh.” Pat sighed. Tiger glanced over at him with an arched brow, teetering a little from the drink when he turned to hail a cab. “Uh. Yeah, thanks.”

And so it wasn’t A Thing. It’s not A Thing. Pat keeps holding his hand, just in case.

Pat has spent so much time worrying about the others, he’s hardly had time to worry about himself. Still, physical therapy is a lot. That and getting used to the bandaged nub above his stitched up forearm where his hand once was. He still raises it sometimes, to grab a fork or run a hand through his hair, before he remembers. He’ll have to wait another few weeks for his temporary prosthetic, and months after that for a proper one. Longer, even, if they can’t scrounge up the funds for it. Mostly, he just tries not to think about it. Except at night, when he stares at the nothing there and thinks about it a little too much. It didn’t really sink in until he talked with Reece, who made an offhand comment about Pat not being able to play the bass anymore and, well, he hadn’t really thought about that. Reece didn’t know what to do once he started crying, that was always Tiger’s area, so they just sort of sat there until Pat sniffled and collected himself and made some unconvincing excuse about medication or phantom pain that Reece looked away and nodded at long enough for him to leave before the tears really started coming. 

Tad stops by after a week. He brings Pat a small teddy bear he names Winnie and some cheap flowers he doesn’t really know what to do with, but takes anyway because they’re yellow and he likes yellow. Tad rocks on his feet and says sorry and Pat says he doesn’t want to talk about it and Tad says okay but he’s sorry anyway, and then he leaves. And that’s that. 

“Hey.” Amber says, and Pat almost jumps out of his skin. He’d absently scrolling on his phone, laying in bed until she stopped at the foot of it. 

“...Hey.” He sets his phone aside and looks at her then, and she’s...at least better than she had been. She looks exhausted, mostly, but he could sense that there even in the green room. She’s standing there, leaning on her forearm crutches because she refuses to use her wheelchair, to no one’s surprise. He was told that eventually she could make her way up to a cane, but it was unlikely she’d ever be able to walk truly uninhibited. 

“Sorry for, uh…”

“Yeah. No, it’s fine! Um. I was just worried about you is all.”

“Right.” She nods her head toward the end of the bed until he gets the message and scoots his feet over enough for her to sit there. They make casual conversation for a while. As casual as they can be after everything, at least. How much the hospital food sucks, how all that seems to play on the tvs are Judge Judy, Wheel of Fortune, and Teen Titans Go, none of which seem particularly entertaining. How Sam has been talking more and more, and is recovering well enough. How Amber is getting used to her crutches, and neither of them look at Pat’s hand. Amber braces herself. “I’m getting discharged. Next couple of days here.”

“Oh. That’s good!”

“Well, I don’t like...have anywhere to go, so…”

“Oh? ...Oh.” He licks his lips and reaches for the water on the bedside tray. “Uh, yeah, me neither. We’re supposed to get the van back before Reece is discharged on Sunday, so...I was just gonna. Sleep in there for a while. Maybe we’ll find a motel or something, I dunno.” 

Amber hums and makes a face like she’s just sucked a lemon before she takes a deep breath. “Do you think I could come with you?”

Pat blinks. “...You want to?”

“Don’t really have much of a choice.”

“...Yeah, okay. Sure, you can come.” He offers her a smile, and she throws a short one back at him. “It’ll be crowded, though. When the others get out.”

“We’ll get a couple rooms.” She says over her shoulder, he nods, and then she’s making her way back out the door and Pat is fumbling to shoot a text to Reece.

All in all, that’s how it rounds out. He spends a couple nights in the front of the van with Reece, their chairs set as far back as they can go, and Amber in the back. When Sam and Tiger get out, they pick them up and find the nearest, cheapest motel and get a couple of rooms, Sam and Amber in one and Tiger, Reece, and Pat in the other. Reece struck up a deal with the owner of the place, relying on pure pity (Pat had tagged along and rested his arm on the counter, just in case) and shelled out a combination of a good portion of his college funds and some apology cash from Tad, who Reece had apparently become close with. 

So right now, it’s Pat and Tiger and a shitty motel vending machine with like 3 kinds of chips and some cheesy crackers. “Dinner of champions,” Tiger says, but it sounds like stepping on gravel. “Doritos or Lays?”

“They got cool ranch?” 

“...Just nacho cheese andddd spicy sweet chili.” 

Pat makes a face. “Lays then.”

Tiger sticks his hand up through the slot of it and rummages around for about two minutes before he sighs deeply and empties his pockets of $2.50 in assorted change and a crumpled bill. Pat gets a bag of sour cream and onion chips thrown at his face, and then they’re parking themselves on the curb and popping the bags open. 

“More air than chips.” Pat sighs, and Tiger nods back at him, having mostly exhausted the use of his voice for the day. The group were learning sign language together in an effort to make it easier on Tiger’s poor throat, but they weren’t far enough along to hold whole conversations in it, so mostly Tiger just nods, gives thumbs up or downs, or makes small little noises of affirmation or protest, which has seemed to work pretty well so far. ASL comes in handy, though, mostly when Pat’s attacks get bad enough he can’t find it in himself to speak. Luckily they’re mostly at night, so Tiger is there to calm him down.

And that’s the other thing. They couldn’t wager much out of the motel man, so it was a queen bed or twin doubles. Amber and Sam had taken the queen, which was a relief, but with no couch in the other, either someone was sharing or someone was on the floor. And well, the beds were big enough, and no one wanted to doom someone still in recovery to the floor, so Pat scooched over and volunteered the other half of his double up to Tiger. Now it’s all trying to keep hush hush on late night conversations until Reece throws a pillow at them, or pretending they didn’t wake up practically fused together. And it’s…nice. The motel isn’t great, sure, but he sort of feels like if they leave this closeness will fade away again, so he clings to it and blames it on close proximity. 

Tiger is knocking their knees together, looking at him quizzically, and he realizes he must’ve been staring off for the past few minutes. He laughs under his breath and leans over to mooch off Tiger’s barbeque chips, even while he gets elbowed for it.

“Smashing Pumpkins.” Pat says after a moment, through a mouthful of chips.

“Huh?”

“They’re uh, y’know. My desert island band?” 

“Like-” He turns and coughs into his elbow and grimaces, and then tries again. “Like Mellon Collie?”

“Yeah. I thought Minor Threat for a bit, maybe, but Jellybelly was...the first song I played with you guys, I think, so. The Smashing Pumpkins.”

“Really?” Tiger grins and leans to rest his head on his shoulder, and Pat nearly melts into the sidewalk. “Nice. Mine’s still Misfits.”

Pat laughs again, which fades into comfortable silence as they finish off their chips. “Hey, Tiger?”

“Mhm?”

“I was thinking.”

“Congratulations.”

Pat huffs and nudges him off of his shoulder, and Tiger laughs a laugh that turns into a cough halfway through, so Pat ends up rubbing his back absentmindedly. “I want it to be A Thing.”

Tiger stares at him like he has two heads. “Want what to be a thing?”

“We, uh. You- behind the-” Pat makes a lot of hand gestures that don’t really amount to anything, and he watches it click.

“Oh.” And then Tiger is kissing him, and Pat is fumbling to grab his shirt for purchase, and it tastes fucking awful because they’d both had truly horrendous chip flavors, but his hair has gotten a little shaggy and it’s soft against his forehead where he leans it there, so it doesn’t really matter. “Thank god.”

It’s not long before Reece is out to stay with Tad, because he really can’t fucking stand them. The other bed is open. Tiger doesn’t pause before climbing into Pat’s anyway. Eventually, they end up just pushing the beds together and rearranging the bedding somewhat comfortably. The tv channels are almost as bad as the hospital ones, so they mostly just listen to music and talk about whatever, or lay tangled together and enjoy the feeling of someone being there and being there for someone. 

When Pat gets his prosthetic, Tiger is there to help him fit it on and marvel at it, even though it’s only the temporary one. At the end of the day, Tiger kisses the sore spots, and Pat presses kisses of his own to the litany of scars on Tiger’s neck, and yeah, maybe Reece was right. Maybe they won’t all die.


End file.
